The new interface prompts the user with certain questions after install, to set up security preferences. (Source: Mozilla)

It'll be easier to manage lots of tabs in the new interface, and the interface now allows new "app tabs" for web applications like Gmail (see bottom right). (Source: Mozilla)

Fans get an early peak at the company's plans

Those
waiting for Firefox 4, the upcoming latest and greatest browser from
Mozilla, might not have to wait long. Speaking at Air Mozilla
today, Mike Beltzner announced that
Firefox 3.7 will become 4.0. The first alpha build of 3.7 was
released on February 10.

With the switch, Mozilla will likely
be much more able to meet its goal to release Firefox 4 in Q4
2010.

The biggest improvements coming in 3.7/4.0 is the Gecko
1.9.3 layout engine, which should bring improved support for new
standards such as HTML5 and CSS3. In the vision outlined in a
blog
post corresponding with his announcement, Beltzner says the
Firefox 4 will be "Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web
technologies (HTML5 and beyond!)."

He
also says that the new browser will be much faster –
"super-duper fast",
to be precise. The biggest speed improvement is the new
JägerMonkey JavaScript engine, which speeds up repetitive scripts.
Other speed improvements include 64-bit
support, a streamlined main thread, and DOM
improvements.

Firefox 4.0 will bring a new look to the browser
with overhauled
UIs across all platforms -- Windows, Linux, and OS X.
Beltzner writes that the new layer will grant users "full control
of their browser, data, and Web experience." Among the UI
improvements are an overhauled tab interface that allows hundreds of
tabs to be easily managed, and allows new web app tabs. The new
UI also prompts the user with security questions earlier, so they
don't have to ask as many questions later on.

A final
important point to note is that with Firefox 4.0, Mozilla will be the
lone player pushing a very different and truly open implementation of
HTML5. Apple and Google both support HTML5, but they both
have thrown
their weight behind h.264, a proprietary video codec. Opera
and Internet Explorer (sans Chrome frame) don't yet have working HTML
5 implementations that can be used with the handful of HTML5 sites
out there (like the YouTube
HTML 5 beta). Microsoft's early
preview build of Internet Explorer 9 uses h.264 as
well.

That leaves Mozilla as the only promoter of a truly open
HTML5. Mozilla is promoting Ogg Theora, a free codec. In
fact Mozilla put up a slide presentation about Firefox 4.0 that
should be available in your Firefox
3.6 browser. The video of the slide presentation can
be found here.

Beltzner
gives a bit of a dig, stating, "If you have Firefox or a modern
web browser that supports fully open HTML video, you can watch the
presentation."

Mozilla looks to be headed in the right
direction with Firefox 4.0; it should be exciting to watch the
product mature through the beta phase.

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Youtube is a website with a collection of videos that you can't play w/out Flash or WMP. The videos are played in a flash player or WMP inside of the browser. The browser just calls the app associated w/ the content via plugin to play the content.

Firefox isn't a media player, it's a we browser. media players primary function is to play music and video, a web browser's primary function is to decode and render web pages. Said web pages may have multimedia content on them, but that does not make a web browser a media player.

The only piece of software that falls into your category is songbird. It is a dedicated media player that has web browsing functionality in it.

Also, screw H.264, it's proprietary, and the web if anything is anti proprietary. The entire web culture revolves around open standards and coding in general. Way to go Mozilla, they are doing the right thing here.

Older video cards don't support H.264, so you'd still need a software decoder. I believe H.264 codecs are included in Windows and OSX these days, but that still leaves out Linux (see my comments on X264 below.)

In the end, I think this is more of a show of principles on Mozilla's end. The fact is, we don't know what's going to happen to H.264 come 2016. If content providers are forced to pay licensing fees on all their videos, Mozilla can give them a big "I told you so!"

X264 is just a different implementation of H.264 though... if a commercial company used X264 to encode and decode video, I'm guessing they'd still have to pay royalties; it's still H.264 video in the end. You can argue that Mozilla is a non-profit organization, but there ARE indirect profits that can be made by browsers (think Google/MS and their search/ad infrastructures.)

quote: With so many hardware h.264 decoding implementations, not including support for this codec is a major mistake.

I don't think they ever said that they were expressly not supporting h.264. They are PRIMARILY pushing ogg Theora as their web video format, though.

I think the real mistake though would be to do what MS, Google, and Apple are doing -- claim they're freeing customers of a "proprietary format" (Flash), when in reality they are handing them another proprietary format (h.264) in an open source package (HTML5).

That's not only deceptive marketing, it's a step backwards for the web. Standards should be open to public use and modification -- that's the whole idea behind HTML or CSS in the first place!

Ogg Theora is a very competitive format and I think with some time it can be made every bit as good as h.264.

+1You are right about them being deceptive. They used all their weight and pressure to change the initial default recommendation to use Ogg Theora as the standard video format in HTML5. Ogg Theora was chosen because it was not affected by any known patents, is royalty-FREE and a good performer.

Don't you see the footprint of companies like M$oft trying to hold off the increased use of open source and open standards that benefit all of humanity in an attempt to force the people to pay for something royalties that you can get today for FREE!

quote: Linux is open but it is not capable of doing things that you could program for a Windows box.. . .Flash is the main reason we are still using 32bit browsers on 64 bit systems

Weird!? I've been using a 64bit web browser with a 64 bit Flash plugin on Linux for over a year (first released November 2008). And before that I used a 64 bit browser with a 32 bit Flash plugin. How did that happen if Linux is not capable of doing all the things that windows can do?

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA